The Effect of Tension and Drop Height on Contact Angle of Droplet on Flexible Substrate in Roll-to-Roll Systems

This study proposes a method for identifying correlations between tension and drop height for sessile droplets in a roll-toroll processing system. The effect of tension and drop height on the contact angle of a sessile droplet is presented. Design of experiment (DOE) methodology and statistical analysis are used to define a correlation between the process parameters. The contact angle is decreased while increasing tension and drop height. The influence of the tension is less significant on the contact angle compared with the effect of the drop height. However, tension should be considered as a major parameter because it is not easy to fix with roll eccentricity and compensating speed of the driven roll. The results of this study show that the effect of tension on the contact angle of a sessile droplet is more important than drop height because the drop height is fixed when the process systems are determined.